When I launched my blog site back in the Spring, I had visions of having time to pursue a new hobby and dabbling a bit in writing about the most authentic parts of life. My relationship with time is a love/hate relationship. I make my plans and time shifts to attend to other things. In this season there has been the draw of indulgence in things like trips to Italy. There has also been the tug of the heart to attend to the things that have greater value: family, diagnoses, struggle, conflict and celebration.

A couple of days ago I listened to a podcast about time and how we manage it (or don’t, really). Covid was a blessed curse as it gifted us more unstructured time than we had ever experienced. For so many of us, we are wired for productivity which is tied closely to worth. I learned about “time traps” and how we are pulled toward work and productivity. Wasting time is seen as frettering away the day. Work addiction is our default. While we value things like connecting with others, praying, and things like engaging in restorative leisure, we find that we primarily feel like we don’t have time for these things. The world rewards “strivers.”

Our hope is that time is within our control and that we will use it wisely. Many of us don’t know to use our time. There is a gap between how we want to use our time and how we actually use our time.

Strivers have too much to do and not enough time to do it all. Being busy is a way to demonstrate to ourself and others that we are highly in demand. This is the philosophy of how we value ourselves. Research shows that this kind of investment really doesn’t bring us happiness. Productivity is our habit and we don’t really know how to enjoy our free time.

We have to train ourselves to make our defaults our family, friends, exercise and leisure activities. We have to be intentional about pushing against our work default. We are left little time for personal relationships. It is possible for us to adjust a little around the “margins” to create space for these things.

It is better to compare yourself to yourself then to others. We have to guard our resources and impose boundaries to protect our leisure time. We need to change our “ideal” image of ourself so that our timing matches a different value.

We often trade money for time because it is a concrete tracking device for time and success. Spending time with others is not an easy thing to measure. We have to be super careful about overscheduling our leisure so that it becomes a burden. When we schedule our leisure to rigidly, we start to feel stressed out. Too many scheduled leisure activities translates to feeling like “work.”

We capitalize on leisure when we use our free time to do things that are intrinsically motivating. When you feel like you are doing the leisure activity because you want to, you enjoy the experience way more.

As we age, we start to gravitate towards things that are meaningful. People who are older value time more than money. Financial insecurity ignites a need to fill our time with productivity to try and catch up.

To make a shift, we are encouraged to do a “time audit.” Evaluate the activities that you pursued during the day and evaluate how each of them made you feel. People who take time to reflect on the things in their day that they are grateful for tend to be more self aware. Document them. You will learn where your enjoyment rests. We need to stop and take a pause to reflect.

Yesterday, I exercised this intentional pause. As I reflected back over several months, I thought about where the markers of enjoyment were on my timeline. I remembered those moments that were “mood boosters.” In my productivity this Summer, I had forgotten that writing and connecting bring elevated enjoyment.

The weariness and downcast nature of my life is directly tied to my striving and my chase of productivity. The most authentic place for me to take a sabbatical is the very place where are say “no” to striving and “yes” to the things that I intrinsically value. I hope to return for frequent extended stays.